Beginning in the 18th century, collecting exotic trees became a national passion in Britain. Country gentlemen (yes, male landowners) strove to outdo each other in assembling trees from faraway sources. In The Tree Hunters, Thomas Pakenham takes the reader to visit the resulting arboreta and to accompany the tree hunters on the sometimes perilous expeditions to collect the seeds that grew into those arboreta.
Kew Gardens earns a substantial notice as an early site. Princess Augusta and her son George III supported efforts to make Kew a center for multiple varieties of trees. The first arboretum open to the public was not Kew but Glasnevin in Dublin. The Dublin Society opened the site by 1800. It included representatives of Linnaeus’s 23 botanical classes, as was thought appropriate, and in addition some examples of attractive variations of each, such as “all kinds of oddities among the fruit trees” (p. 126). Walter Wade, who selected them may have shocked purists by these choices, “but Wade knew when it was time to play to the gallery.”
Of the many tree hunters in this book, David Douglas may be the most amazing. He collected in South America, in the U.S. on both coasts, and finally in Hawaii. His seeds gave Britain the Douglas fir and the noble fir among many dozens of others. In searching he drove himself to exhaustion repeatedly. In the end, in Hawaii, he died by falling into a hidden pit designed to trap cattle. Or was he murdered? Pakenham tells stories well.
The Tree Hunters recounts many fascinating adventures; it also includes much specific information. The excellent index, for instance, has 19 subtopics under “oak.”